| Summary : A bowl barrow, part of the Oakley Down barrow group (SU 01 NW 19). Listed by RCHME as Wimborne St Giles 97 and by Grinsell as WImborne St Giles 20, it was described by RCHME as a mound 54 feet in diameter and 6 feet high. It was excavated in the early 19th century by Cunnington and Hoare (their barrow 20), who reported that it "produced a sepulchral urn which was broken. On removing the fragments, we discovered an interment of burned bones, over which was a considerable quantity of decayed linen cloth, the filaments of which, at first, appeared like hair. This deposit was accompanied by a round pin and an arrowhead of bone, a very perfect spear-head [dagger] of brass [bronze], with a great part of the wooden handle adhering to it...". The dagger (minus bone handle) and the bone pin are in Devizes Museum, Wiltshire. The remaining items are lost. In 1968, a sherd from a collared urn was found on one side of the mound in a sheep or rabbit scrape. In 1977, following further erosion by a sheep track on the same side of the mound, an urn was exposed. A small excavation was undertaken to recover the urn (tentatively identified as a biconical urn), which appeared to have been placed in an upright position, surrounded by rough chalk rubble. Several large flint nodules exposed in the excavation proved to represent a small cairn of nodules over another urn, this one being left in situ. An attempt was made to restore the barrow mound. The excavated urn is in Dorset County Museum, Dorchester. |